


Predatrix's Brit-Picking Notes

by Predatrix



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Meta, Other, brit-picking, non-fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-03-16 05:17:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3475871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Predatrix/pseuds/Predatrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This started out as a response to one too many stories where a Yank misunderstood the context of the word village, and then took up an uneasy existence as a comment in someone else's Brit-picking notes. </p><p>Then it occurred to me I'd never seen anyone else's Brit-picking essay cover this particular issue, so I started off my own. </p><p>Will add other chapters as and when.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Types of Places to Live

Americans often seem to have two main sorts of places, big urban conurbations and "small towns", which have a connotation of rural life and are often really small (the cultural background to this is uncertain for me, a lot of American cultural artefacts seem to be very nostalgic about small towns). Please, can some American correct me on this: I'm just going by TV and books...

Meanwhile Brits have a few extra terms. "Village" (or occasionally "hamlet") is the usual term for a really small place. Small in population terms, sometimes quite straggling spatially. A village is unlikely to have much tourist trade unless it's really basing itself on that, and that sort of thing involves a lot of thinking about the road network, how the tourists get there and from where. That's the usual pretty, kempt village with a village green and planning permission to keep eyesores out the Americans are often thinking of, but that sort of village needs plenty of well-off people to keep it that way, it doesn't just happen. 

Country villages may well have started out based on agriculture and may nowadays be slowly dying as the younger people leave. Villages typically have few or no specialised shops, just a corner shop/newsagent desperately hanging on while people go to supermarkets nowadays, and definitely a pub. What makes a village nowadays is probably rural location (at least some fields between it and the nearest town) and the lack of specialised shops. 

Suburbs are often erstwhile villages that got swallowed up by the nearest town: as a rule of thumb, if a place is, say, four miles from a city, you won't see any fields or anything separating it from the town centre. This sort of place probably was a village several decades ago. 

One dead giveaway is Americans talking about a village when it isn't. One story threw me right out talking about Godalming as a "pretty little village with whitewashed stones". Er, no. Looking it up on Wikipedia, it's an attractive little market town that probably sort of counts as a suburb (4 miles from Guildford, the county town of Surrey). The Home Counties (i. e. the ones surrounding London) have very high property prices and are thought of as desirable places to live/commute from. A book-blog recommending E F Benson's excellent Mapp & Lucia novels described them as set in the charming little village of Tilling. Nope. Tilling (based on Rye where the author lived) was an attractive market town. A town with enough history and enough prosperous people to support a market (in the sense of open-air stalls). He wrote about people who were distinctly well-off, not to say idle, and could afford to keep in touch with London fashions and theatre. Certainly at the time when Benson was writing, village life would have been a trade-off: you got the fresh air, but lacked civilised amenities!

Towns may be of various sizes, but they're very likely to be bigger than villages, and have more ambitious shops. If it has a chemist's (="drugstore"), or a shop from one of the national chains ("Boots", "Smith's", etc), it's more likely to be a town. If it has a department store like Debenhams or John Lewis's it's seriously big. Bigger towns, often county towns, may be bigger than small cities. Cities get their status when the Queen says so. Earlier on, city status was often down to the possession of a cathedral.

See comments below: I wasn't entirely accurate in the definition of villages, although they are roughly "usually smaller than towns". 

The best advice I can give Americans (and, of course, other non-Brits) is to check Wikipedia etc for not only direct status ("village", "town" with subtypes, "city") but a rough idea of the social and economic class. Shading richer goes toward prettiness and being able to afford nice shops/schools; shading poorer will get dying rural villages, the occasional eyesore that never gets fixed, and city/town/suburban shop-fronts remaining uncleared since they went out of business suddenly. Also, even the nicer big towns and cities have horrible areas. 


	2. Language

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (I'd forgotten I had this hanging about, but here we are)
> 
> American vs British Language

American vs British Language

"Gotten" -- Brits almost invariably use 'got', certainly in Standard English. My Northern Irish friend tells me that in Scots or Northern Irish dialects people _might_ use 'gotten', but it's certainly not usual in British English.

"Go do something" -- "Go and do something." If you hear British people using the American usage it's probably because they're the younger generation and have picked it up from American telly. It's not naturally idiomatic British English.

"A ways" -- "some way", or "a way". This one strikes me as distinctly rural or small-town American. I wouldn't expect it on the cultural artefacts we get from New York or other urban centres.

"Most all" as short for "almost all". No. This one strikes me as rural as well.

SLANG:

"Nutters" means more than one mad person. We do not say "go nutters" or even worse "go nutters about". Trust me on this.

"Bugger all" does not mean the same as either "oh, bugger!" or "bugger off!". It's an idiomatic expression meaning "nothing at all" (like "sod all" or "fuck all" which are British English and used in exactly the same way). I have seen this misused all over the place.

Any more suggestions? I can't think of any more offhand: these are the most obvious ones.


	3. Cultural Assumptions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> e.g. Things that you might think are universal which really really aren't

I just tripped over this one on a piece of Sherlock fic. It had a page with Molly shouting (twice) and being very assertive, which I thought was odd, but then there was a cultural assumption that Brits don't have:

Americans have a thing about calling people by their full names to tell them off, which is assumed to go right back to getting into trouble with parents. Fine, as far as it goes, but...we don't do that. 

I know exactly where I first found out about that: John D Fitzgerald's books about "The Great Brain" (a ten-year-old business-genius/conman based on his brother). I remember noticing specifically how strange that seemed because Brits don't have a shared experience that way. Since then it's turned up often enough in American TV or books or fanfic to make it clear it's an expected shared experience. 

In fact, Brits are far less likely to _have_ a middle name (I don't, for example, and nor does my sister) and far less likely to _use_ a middle name, tending to regard them as social compromises in the family or names the person can use if they turn out to really _hate_ their first name. But as for: "William Sherlock Scott Holmes, you are in so much trouble right now!" -- that's a definite tell for "this writer isn't British." 

I can't offhand think of a Brit shared experience to set against this, especially as I don't spend much time around kids. My sister tends to use numbers counting up, and I have an idea that's not uncommon. 

Another cultural difference is that Brits are less conformity-policed, certainly at high-school age. I get the impression that Americans are keener on strong gender markers: certainly I read a book not set in the dim and distant past called _The Last Time I Wore a Dress_ , about a young woman who got sent to mental health experts for essentially being a stroppy teenager and not wearing skirts or make-up. We're also more likely to separate into groups of friends rather than that characteristically American division of The Jocks, The Nerds, etc. A book on Asperger's for girls has a chapter by a girl without autism, who explained to the rest of us how to learn to like "the right" things (as in, to give us social cachet, unlike the things we _actually_ liked): this really infuriated me.


	4. In the Kitchen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Different assumptions about the making of tea.

One of the most obvious tells for a Yank writing Sherlock is the attitude to tea. 

No, not the cultural pre-eminence of tea for Brits, most of you have got there before you set fingers to keyboard.

But...what's a "tea-kettle"? We have "the kettle", the thing that boils water for your drinks, including tea. When the kettle boils, water may be poured into the teapot. The teapot is where tea is brewed, unless using one tea-bag per cup. I don't think Americans go in for teapots much. We do rather less since a lot of Brits have tea-bag tea a lot of the time, like Sherlock and John, and teapots are more important for making leaf-tea slowly and carefully. I bet someone like Mycroft is still a stickler for _good_ leaf-tea, made just so. 

And you Americans assume old-fashioned hob-kettles. Someone middle-aged, like me, can remember kettles on the hob. My nan had one. I wouldn't be surprised if people in rural areas had them sometimes. But the assumption for most Brits in urban areas, in areas where the National Grid can be relied upon, is that a kettle is an electric kettle on one of the kitchen worktops. This has probably been the case since about the '80s if not before. Most of them nowadays are cordless, resting on a plug-in base, and the kettle itself is lifted off for pouring or refilling. This is more convenient -- certainly in terms that an electric kettle will just turn off if you forget it, while a hob kettle won't.


End file.
